The author of that piece, Tom Pyzdek, made the simple but provocative
point that those of us who care about quality should do more to
live up to the lofty claims that we make on its behalf. "As we
always tell our employers, suppliers and clients, we can never
be good enough," he wrote.

Quality is such an attractive banner that sometimes we think
we can get away with just waving it, without doing the hard work
necessary to achieve it. That approach won't last forever, however,
and eventually problems start coming to the surface.

When they do, it's easy to start pointing fingers. Senior executives
didn't take quality to heart, say some. The work force wasn't
truly involved, say others. Or maybe it's concluded that quality
just isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

Fortunately the quality profession has a self-correcting mechanism,
the recognition that continuous improvement is vital and necessary.
Sometimes improvements come on a global scale, such as with International
Organiza-tion for Standardization, known as ISO, standards, or
in a dramatic burst of publicity, as with Six Sigma.

But quality improvements also come incrementally, when practitioners
refine their use of established quality tools. This month's issue
is devoted to three examples of quality tools that have been fine-tuned
to make them more effective.
Starting on p. 37, Mark Kaganov discusses the use of checklists
in writing quality manuals. As he points out, the arrival of the
final version of ISO 9000:2000 makes this a good time for companies
to look for ways to improve their development and revision of
quality manuals.

S.K. Vermani describes an approach that Boeing has used to deal
with shortcomings in traditional statistical process control in
an environment of reduced production rates and smaller lot sizes
(see p. 43). The article
combines the principles of both precontrol and short run charts.

In his article on Pareto analysis (see
p. 51), William Stevenson examines the typical approach, using
frequency of occurrence, and explains why this can lead to problems.
He then goes on to suggest alternatives that can focus attention
on the most important factors.

If nothing else, these three articles show that the quality
profession is indeed capable of taking its own advice by using
quality thinking to improve quality tools.